Universe of Two

by Stephen P. Kiernan

  Bronsky gave him a hard look. Perhaps it was anger, but the man was often inscrutable. “Come, Fishk. Trinity test has job for you.”

  At once he set out in the storm, holding up the absurd umbrella though it spared him from not one drop. Charlie tossed the unfinished letter on his cot, flipped up his collar, and followed.

  They skirted the command center, every light on inside, a man on the back stoop smoking. They came to a mud puddle that writhed and croaked, and only after they had passed did Charlie realize it was full of copulating frogs. Striking out across the open, they bent lower under the rainfall. When lightning flashed Charlie could not help wincing. But soon they arrived at the main barn, where they ducked out of the wet.

  The lights were on in there too. Rain drummed on the sheet metal roof. Charlie saw two giant tanks wearing lead plating, knights in heavy armor. “What are those for?”

  “Things various,” Bronsky said, not elaborating. “Wait here.” He went and spoke to one soldier, who directed him to another, who nodded at whatever Bronsky said, then both men returned to Charlie.

  “Here,” the officer said, handing him a rain slicker. “Won’t help much, but won’t hurt either.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Bronsky led him to a jeep, where another soldier sat behind the wheel. He wore a slicker too. “Driver is take you to tower. You relieve guard there, keep Gadget company.”

  “In the middle of an electrical storm?”

  Bronsky nodded. “Is prevent sabotage.” And he hurried away before Charlie could object. Thunder rolled across the sky. He stood, hands hanging at his sides. “All clears,” he muttered.

  “Ready when you are, sir,” the soldier prompted.

  “Right.” Charlie navigated to the other side of the jeep. “I’m going to sit with the Gadget in a lightning storm?”

  “Pardon me, sir,” the driver said. “You’ll want to have that slicker on before we set out.”

  Charlie, speechless, pulled it on halfheartedly, leaving one side exposed, as the jeep lurched out into the storm.

  There were lights on at the tower, and when they pulled up, a pair of guards stood beside the metal steps. “Here you go, sir.”

  Charlie’s side was drenched. He had tried to fix the slicker on the way out, but the ride was too rough. “The lightning has not let up one iota.”

  “Yes, sir.” The soldier revved the engine. “I’ll give the man you’re relieving a ride back, but he’d better get down here double-time.”

  Charlie studied the boy at the wheel, who kept his gaze straight ahead. “Right.”

  The guards did not move as Charlie passed, nor register his existence as he began climbing the wet steps. He held the railings on either side, but they felt flimsy, little help if he should slip. A hundred-foot tower meant two hundred steps, and he put caution ahead of haste. One glance down showed him the lights of the jeep below, rain crossing its beams, and he continued the ascent. Charlie remembered climbing a fire tower on Mount Hope in Maine, back in his summer camp days. But that one was only sixty feet tall, other boys had already made it up safely, and it had been a bluebird sunny day.

  On the platform, the wind was stronger and rain fell at a sharper angle. Charlie pulled back the tent flap to enter, and found a soldier asleep with his back against the Gadget. At once he flew into a rage.

  “What the hell is the matter with you?”

  The soldier blinked open his eyes. “Sir?”

  “Don’t touch this thing. Get off of it.”

  The soldier rose to his feet. “I didn’t hurt anything, sir.”

  “You don’t know that. How can you sleep at a time like this?”

  “Three straight nights of guard duty, sir. Without so much as a break to pee.”

  That stopped Charlie for a moment. He went to the Gadget, which looked transformed from when he’d seen it hoisted. The exterior was webbed with wires of many colors, connecting his detonators. For the first time he saw the doubler—a giant steel case where sixteen wires converged. “This device is big,” he explained, “but it’s still fragile. Disconnect one wire and you’ve ruined everything.”

  “I don’t even know what it does,” the soldier said. “No one told me anything.”

  Charlie took a long look at him. Parched lips, no facial hair, an expression of fear. Thunder rumbled overhead. “This is not a safe place. You should go.”

  In seconds, Charlie heard boots scrambling down the metal steps. He ran his hands over the Gadget, checking connections one by one. They all remained sound. By then his temper had cooled, and Charlie knew he had overreacted. He drew back the tent flap. The lights of the jeep were long gone, a wet wind sweeping the sands.

  “I have become Beasley,” he told the storm, which replied with a gust in his face.

  Then lightning flashed and thunder cracked simultaneously, and he knew that the worst of it was directly overhead. Charlie ducked back inside and eyed the metal floor. Perfect, he thought: everything was an electrical conductor. Who knew how long he would be up there? A tent flap in the corner snapped back and forth as though someone were shaking it. There was no question about whether the detonators would spark. One direct strike and he would be obliterated. Would he even feel it? It would happen in millionths of a second, his body blasted into its tiniest particles.

  What was the name of that book he’d read as a child? The one in which a sailor boy is forced to stay high in the crow’s nest, leagues and leagues from land, swaying and clinging while a hurricane smites his little ship and boils the surrounding sea. Charlie recalled that the boy survived the storm, but he did not remember how. He placed his palm on an open spot in the Gadget’s shell, and waited for the world to end.

  Eventually Charlie began to hum. Then sing. Then try to remember his part in every chorus piece he had ever learned. It was not pleasant, but unless a bolt of thunder was especially loud, he found himself half-forgetting his circumstances.

  Hours passed, the rain a white noise punctuated by startling claps of thunder. He couldn’t help wincing every time. Eventually Charlie heard something like a small hammer, tapping on the sides of the tower. Someone was climbing the steps.

  Then the flap drew back, and Horn stepped inside the tent. “Hello, Fish.”

  “David.” Charlie gulped with relief. “What a surprise.”

  “Two miserable hours in the latrine, or I would have been here sooner.” He scanned the little enclosure, noticed the flapping bit of tent, and set a toolbox on its corner to stop the noise. “Nerves, I guess. Anyway, Bronsky found me a few minutes ago.”

  Horn continued inspecting the platform, saving the Gadget for last.

  “An earlier guard fell asleep on it,” Charlie said, “but I checked the connections.”

  “Thanks.” Horn peered around the orb. “Looks intact.”

  “Are you my relief?”

  “Yes. Though in my opinion, you shouldn’t have been here at all.”

  “Oh, I don’t know—”

  “We can’t delay the test, what with Truman meeting Churchill and Stalin tomorrow. The president needs to know if the Gadget will work.” He placed both hands on the doubler, as if he were preparing it for some ceremony. “But it’s my screwup, no question. I never thought to test for a storm.”

  At that instant, Charlie realized that he was not going to die that day. His shoulders lowered, his breathing eased.

  “Anyway, your ride’s waiting.” Horn sat, pulling a paperback from his back pocket. “Humor essays, to pass the time. Wish me luck.”

  “Good luck, David,” he said, then threw back the tent opening, and as quickly as he could, Charlie raced down the steps. As the other side of his shirt became drenched, he realized he’d left his slicker up on the platform. He did not care enough to go back.

  The same soldier sat at the wheel of the jeep, but there was a passenger in back.

  “There he is,” Giles called out. “The babysitter’s shift is over.”

 
“Boy, am I glad to see you.”

  “Feeling’s mutual,” he replied. “You okay?”

  “Better every minute.”

  Giles tapped the driver’s shoulder. “Please get us the hell out of here.”

  At 2:00 a.m. Giles stood at the tent opening, watching the rain fall, and declared, “Chrysalism.” He turned to Charlie, who was stretched out on his cot but wide awake. “Know what I mean?”

  “Not in the least. What does today’s ten-cent word mean?”

  “Chrysalism. The womblike comfort of being sheltered during a storm.”

  Charlie rolled onto his side to face away. “There is no comfort tonight.”

  At 3:30 Giles roused in his folding chair. The storm had passed. “How about petrichor?” he asked Charlie. “Do you know that one?”

  Charlie barely shook his head. He lay on his back, staring at the roof of the tent.

  “The scent of the ground after a rain.” Giles widened the tent opening with one finger. “I love it.”

  At 4:00 a.m., the countdown recommenced, with a detonation target of five thirty. Half an hour later, Horn returned to the command center. Charlie saw him climbing out of a jeep, and hurried over. “Thanks for relieving me out there.”

  Horn smiled. “We both feel relief at this point, right?” He bobbed from side to side. “Now I have to play goalie.”

  He climbed into another jeep, which took him to the relay tent. Charlie knew from the planning that this was where Horn would sit during the test, manning the only switch that, once the final orders came, could stop a detonation if something went awry.

  The remaining boys also went to their assigned observation stations. For Charlie and Giles, that meant the southern end of the firing area, where a concrete bunker sat half buried in the sand, a row of windows facing north to the tower. The ease Charlie had felt after leaving the platform had evaporated. Now he held his stomach as though it pained him.

  At 5:09, the twenty-minute countdown began. The announcement came booming over loudspeakers mounted outside the ranch’s house, and radios at the observation bunkers. Charlie recognized the voice: Sam Allison, an affable physicist who sang to himself while walking the project’s hallways. Charlie knew him from the choir, too: a clear, steady tenor. Around the Gadget, meanwhile, Charlie imagined there was an eerie silence.

  The top command men occupied a separate shelter. It had a cluster of measuring equipment screwed and bolted onto the roof. One physicist handed out suntan oil, to protect the observers from ultraviolet light.

  Outside the southern shelter, Charlie watched Giles poke twigs of different sizes into the sand. “I’m stealing Monroe’s idea,” he explained. “To measure how high the explosion cloud goes.”

  Charlie nodded wordlessly, then went off to relieve himself.

  An MP at the bunker entry called the boys to find secure places. Charlie was surprised to see Mather there, calmly smoking against the wall. When he waved, Mather responded with a cool, slow nod. More boys sardined into the narrow space, clustering by the windows. A few remained outside. They’d been instructed to lie on their bellies with their feet to the tower, but none of them did it.

  “Come all this way, and not see?” one said, chuckling. “Not a chance.”

  The MP stood near them. “You’re civilian, so you don’t have to obey orders. But it’s my job to encourage you to comply.”

  “Thanks,” the technician said, not moving. “Job well done.”

  Soon they were all hushed, smoking or talking quietly. They fidgeted. They ignored one another’s odors. At the ten-minute mark—the milestone when, aside from Horn at his switch, human control ceased and the automated process began—Charlie rose to relieve himself again.

  “Fish,” Mather called. “You’re as nervous as a cat.”

  “I’m fine,” he insisted. “Too much coffee.” And he headed outside.

  “You’d be agitated, too,” Giles told the boys, “if those were your triggers all needing to fire at the same instant.”

  “Never been done, can’t be done,” Mather said. “Even with Horn’s help, Fish isn’t smart enough. I’ve argued that for weeks.”

  Giles bristled. “We’ll see.”

  Observation planes had flown south from Holloman Air Force Base, to monitor from the sky, their noise preventing conversation for a full minute. When Charlie returned from his moment outside the bunker, he stepped carefully over the other boys’ legs to reclaim his place near one of the windows.

  “Hey, friend.” Giles shifted to make space. “You afraid that it won’t go off?”

  Charlie shook his head. “I’m afraid that it will.”

  A flare rose into the night sky: two minutes till detonation.

  Mather let out a sigh. “I would not want to be Horn right now.”

  No one answered. They knew that even in silence, they had one another, while Horn at the switch was entirely alone. He would need to decide whether or not to proceed, based on an array of indicator dials, before the countdown reached six. After that the process was irrevocable. The observation planes arced up and away, out of range. A lovely shape, Charlie thought, the arc.

  The one-minute flare rose, bright red in the black sky. As advised, everyone in the vicinity—inside and out, the MP included—lowered welding goggles into place. Silence draped on the bunker like a fog.

  “Hey,” Giles said. “Who wants to head out for a nice cold beer?”

  No one laughed. Time had momentum, a weight they all felt. Ten, nine, eight. The signal surged down the wire. Seven, six, five. By then they knew Horn had not stopped it. Four, three, two. The greatest fuse in human history was lit. One.

  The first instant was darkness, the whole sky black for the merest fraction of a second, followed by a light later calculated to equal the brightness of one hundred suns. It illuminated everything—stones, men’s faces, the distant mountains—with a cruel and brilliant clarity. A blast of heat came next, as if someone had opened an oven door.

  Even at that distance the temperature was hard to withstand, but the heat passed as it rose, a fireball billowing into the air, raging on itself. It ran through the colors of the rainbow, deep purples closer to the earth, bright oranges and yellows at the height of the climbing cloud. The pillar of power rose almost sexually before widening in every direction, a boiling head with broadening shoulders, and was that a flash of lightning inside the explosive cloud?

  The scene took place entirely in silence, as if projected on a screen. Fully half a minute passed before the sound reached the bunker, a blast, then a roar that shook the earth. It growled, and endured, and carried so much dust and stones and sand that it scoured the observation windows. Instantly they became as opaque as sea glass.

  The MP bent his head against the force of it. “Holy fuck.”

  Then the air rushed back toward the test site, pulling like an ocean’s undertow, as an inferno ravenous for oxygen sucked everything toward itself. It surprised the men, some of whom glanced backward, perplexed, as if expecting to see another explosion in that direction. Meanwhile the burning shaft flowered upward into a toadstool shape, roiling orange like lava, climbing miles into the sky.

  “We did it,” Giles cried, shaking Charlie by both arms. “It worked.”

  Shouting huzzahs, the technicians threw down their goggles and rushed outside, watching as the furious cloud rose and spread. The men hooted and danced as though they were drunk, patting one another on the back, shaking hands. One raised his fist and shouted, “Take that, Mr. Emperor.”

  The MP’s face was ashen. “Holy holy fuck.”

  “Cheer up, chum,” Mather answered, skipping past. “The war will soon be over.”

  “This is what you people have been building all this time?”

  Giles was squatting by his measuring sticks, and he called out. “Seven. The dust cloud rose seven miles.”

  But the others ignored him, their revelry careening outward, while pink in the east hinted at a day soon to begin. T
he plume reached its peak, then opened across the sky. Gradually the men calmed enough to clamber into trucks and jeeps, caravanning back to the command center, swerving and honking all the way.

  They forgot one of their kind. In time he would have to march the whole five miles. When he arrived midmorning, sunburned and parched, the guards would speculate that he must have been caught in some unprotected place at the time of the blast. But that was hours later. Until well past dawn, he remained forgotten, squatting in a corner of the observation bunker, whispering one thing over and over: “Brenda. Brenda.”

  Charlie huddled in the dirt, his clothes soaked with sweat, his goggles still in place. Try as he might, he could not make his hands stop shaking.

  41.

  Dear Brenda:

  I have written and thrown away eighty pages to you. The world is immense and terrifying. I cannot come on Saturday this week, because The Hill has been closed for security and celebration purposes. I am not celebrating. I am not secure. I will take the Sunday bus, arriving at 10 a.m.

  I need you.

  Charlie

  That was his letter, the entirety of it, which arrived on Friday afternoon. Seven sentences, and it changed everything for me. I had always known that Charlie was sensitive, and that the world might take advantage of him. But that letter revealed the depth of his vulnerability, in a way I had not admitted to myself before.

  All I wanted was to hold him close, listen to whatever was causing him pain, and provide what comfort I could. All the times I’d counted days or hours till I would see him suddenly felt trivial. He’d said “I need you.”

  But 10:00 a.m. on a Sunday? That was the worst possible time. I played the 8:30 worship, then hurried over to East Palace Avenue, knowing I would have to hustle straight back for the service at eleven. The bus must have arrived early, too, because it was long gone and there was Charlie, standing alone on the sidewalk, peering from side to side, his hands moving like he was strumming an imaginary guitar.

  “Brenda,” he cried out. “Oh, Brenda.”